various responses to libertarian socialist rants

That isn’t the point of Sarkeesian’s videos. The point of them is that we live in a rape culture and that men are a constant threat to women so they owe women to constantly supplicate and prove they aren’t raping, degenerate, oppressive monsters at all times. The proof that we don’t live in a rape culture is that anyone would take this garbage seriously. Tell me, do you think blacks owe it to white people to prove they are non threatening and not criminals? Do you think the reason crime rates are higher in minority neighborhoods is the result of their “culture?” Listen to yourself.

Replace “women” with “the children” or “the family” and it would be no different than the bigoted scaremongering tripe that comes from the social and religious conservative right. In both cases it’s about demonization and bigotry, not justice, truth, or equality. If right wingers made a series of videos claiming that video games were destroying morality, everybody on the left would snicker. Yet if we replace “the children” with women, you turn into a sanctimonious, unthinking lynch mob.

Time and time again you go out of your way to avoid recognizing the obvious roots of feminism in the moralism of 20th century bourgeois western white women. Appealing to chivalry was always how a ruling class could shame men into wars. It’s always been tied directly to lynch mob persecution, racism, and moral panic. “Street harasser” Emmett Till was lynched by the Klan for whistling at a white woman. What makes you think that your desire to protect the trembling womenfolk and avoid even the most basic critical engagement with feminist theory is any fucking different?

This shit is just embarrassing. You idiots are destroying the left. And you’re taking all those quotes out of context. Nobody in the MRM thinks women or anyone else deserves to be raped, get real. Do you not get that you’re not on the hook to protect women from the boogeymen? That’s chivalry, not equality. Women are adults, not children. Is there ever a point where you start to think of them as such? Protip: Sarkeesian and people like her aren’t criticizing the damsel trope in the rape culture, they are invoking the trope and damseling women in real life.

Statistically speaking, violent crime is higher in minority neighborhoods in the United States. White racists are afraid of blacks and hate them for this very reason. In fact, you could argue that this is all that bigotry really is: the hatred of some group because they make us afraid. As a consequence, bigots always attempt to legislate the group that makes them afraid out of existence.

Marijuana, for instance, was associated with Mexican immigrants menacing white women and subsequently made illegal. Cocaine was associated with blacks menacing white women and was subsequently made illegal. The suffragettes associated drinking alcohol with lower class men who abused their wives and subsequently became the most important force for making it illegal. I hope that we can agree that the drug war is really a race war, an excuse to wage war against groups a dominant society or class disapproves of, so I’m having a hard time seeing the difference between this rhetoric and what feminists are pushing today.

Is it possible that modern feminism is actually a form of bigotry? It’s clearly psychologically identical, and this endless need to police men in public to create “safe spaces” for women really has the sanctimonious, hysterical lynch mob logic of a moral panic, doesn’t it? Are you sure that your seemingly uncritical engagement with feminism isn’t really just a modern form of chivalry?

Are you sure that modern feminism doesn’t unconsciously retain the sexist assumptions that belonged to bourgeois white women of another era? Am I the reactionary, or are you?

Also, the scene in which the woman is catcalled is pretty disingenuous. Nobody is suggesting that women deserve to be cat called for dressing a certain way, but it’s pretty likely that, given that particular neighborhood and the way she was dressed, they probably assumed she was a prostitute.

And of course, you’re right, we don’t know if she would be just as likely to be cat called in a different kind of neighborhood, but then again it should be telling that the producers of the documentary didn’t go to a wealthier neighborhood, now did they? Curious.

In fact, it appears that they dressed a woman in an ultra short skirt and had her walk through an impoverished area where one might go to solicit prostitutes and used the confusion in order to suggest that women should live in fear of evil, “sexually entitled” males.

Are we supposed to believe women that don’t appear to potentially be prostitutes in an area where one might to go purchase sex will get the same reaction? Oh wait, that’s exactly what we’re supposed to believe, and that is what will feed our confirmation bias because we won’t bother to look at it critically because sanctimonious indignation is more emotionally satisfying than figuring out what is true.

Y’know what’s really funny about this video? Its profound and obvious sexism. Of course the idea of women having horrible, inaccurate and bigoted ideas which might have consequences and produce lynch mob persecution politics and moral panic is, well…. funny. Why? Because they’re just powerless girls. To think their ideas could potentially be harmful, oppressive, corrosive or unjust would mean that we actually take their ideas seriously, yeah?

We prefer instead to think of them as powerless damsels. They’re always the good guys or beleaguered underdogs, and any suggestion that they can be something other than this is worthy of a laugh. According to the self proclaimed gender egalitarians. women are apparently made of sugar, spice, and everything nice. Anyone who disagrees wears a fedora and is just mad that he can’t get laid.

Ok, this really isn’t that difficult. What happens to men when they aren’t powerful? What happens to them when they don’t have gainful employment, for instance, or social status that comes with education? How do women treat them? See?

Could that be the root of “male power?” Why would anybody care about power in the first place unless they perceived the possibility of powerlessness, and what is a male who doesn’t successfully compete for social status and wealth if not powerless where women are concerned? You can’t see that this is a female specific and profound form of social power?

Hurrr hurrr could that be the root of the patriarchy? You’re not so blinded by your desire to be acceptable to women or your fear of being seen as a fedora wearing, embittered “creep” that you can’t see that women own masculinity, not men. Masculinity doesn’t belong to men to define or redefine, since it is men who face the risk of being weeded out of the gene pool, not women. Men don’t get to decide what women want and expect of them.

Is it possible that they aren’t the trembling damsels you thought they were, social justice guy who can’t recognize how chivalry and patriarchy are linked?

We’re descended from twice as many females as males. Reproductive success for men has always been far more variant than it is for women. The very same masculinity you identify as the root of female oppression is only a reflection of women’s sexual choices. It is the competition for mates which draws men into social and economic competition, they do this to win the approval of the highest quality females, or more likely, to avoid being weeded out entirely.

That is the origin of surplus production, property relations, class and class antagonism, nation states, capitalism, slavery, genocide, and war. Men don’t die by the millions in wars after being shamed into the heroic ideal in order to protect women and children from whatever boogeyman or destroy their health in hard labor occupations because they are “privileged,” genius.

Women, by all honest and rational accounts, are and have always been a bourgeoisie couched within the bourgeoisie. Women aren’t oppressed by society, they are society. Their value isn’t in question, it never was. Yours is. Nobody will admonish women for not being “real women” and “womaning up.” Society cares about the lives of women, not men. We’re disposable workhorses and scapegoats.

Surely a fucking socialist can see that it is patently absurd to take bourgeois privileged white woman’s characterization of the “power” and “privilege” of the tiny elite of bourgeois men as indicative of the lives of all men while at the same time trying to hide behind the interests of working class women who they couldn’t give a flying fuck about. And they don’t.

Or did you not notice that women entering the workforce en masse in the late 1970s helped to depress wages and break labor? That’s progress? I guess a privileged white woman who obsesses about “manspreading” and female representation in shitty tv shows might think so. Did you really get hoodwinked into defending this shit because you’re this unable to engage with feminism critically? That’s embarrassing.

Gee, didn’t you ever notice the inconsistency in feminists shaming men for being unemployed and living with their parents whenever those men happened to level criticism at them? That’s the left? Grow up, junior. You’re nobody’s hero and women appreciate your defense of them a lot less than you think.

People like Sam Harris rail against religion while acting as apologist for “humanitarian intervention,” or the modern version of white man’s burden, as if nationalism which justifies the genocide, repression, war, and proxy dictatorship of imperialism in the name of “progress” and “development” isn’t a knuckle dragging death cult. Most thinking people figured out that god doesn’t exist in 7th or 8th grade. Move on.

Also. calling men “pussies” doesn’t demean cis women, it demeans men, meaning that men, unlike women, have to prove they are men. In other words, their acceptability to society (which includes both men and women) is conditional whereas this is not the case for women. Women apparently have value and a place in society simply by virtue of the fact that they exist.

I didn’t realize the obligation to prove you’re a man is a privilege. I didn’t know obligations were privileges.

What’s more, I’m pretty certain women are allowed to be women. Nobody demeans a woman for being a woman except feminists and possibly some religious conservatives, depending on your point of view, but that shouldn’t be surprising since their backward method of reasoning about the world is identical. Historical idealism always ends in bigotry and persecution politics.

Isn’t the benevolent sexism of left wing pandering to the damsels, most of which are bourgeois white women, obviously a form of chivalry? I don’t understand how you equate this with “equality.” If you’re going to tie legitimate criticisms of capitalism to this bourgeois white woman’s understanding of “gender equality,” you might as well be a recruiter for reactionaries who will con downwardly mobile working class men into insulating the owners of capital from the prospect of worker revolt because you better believe that their inability to start or support families and generally meet women’s expectations of them is the single biggest thing that colors their interpretation of current events and of ideology.

Or did you not realize that it is women who decide what masculinity is yet? That is after all why married men out earn both women and unmarried men. It’s because women have decided that “being a man” means making as much if not more than them. So much for that equality shit, I guess. Oh, I’m sorry, you’re too worried about people thinking you’re a fedora wearing, embittered, ancap misogynist who can’t get laid to consider these questions. The truth is scary if it means it might make us unacceptable to women. Imagine taking women’s ideas seriously enough to critique them. Crazy, right?